| ### Fourth Tractate ### PROBLEMS OF THE SOUL (2) ###  |

| #### Chapter 1 |

| #### #### What, then, will be the Soul's discourse, what its memories in the Intellectual Realm, when at last it has won its way to that Essence? #### Obviously from what we have been saying, it will be in contemplation of that order, and have its Act upon the things among which it now is; failing such Contemplation and Act, its being is not there. Of things of earth it will know nothing; it will not, for example, remember an act of philosophic virtue, or even that in its earthly career it had contemplation of the Supreme. #### When we seize anything in the direct intellectual act there is room for nothing else than to know and to contemplate the object; and in the knowing there is not included any previous knowledge; all such assertion of stage and progress belongs to the lower and is a sign of the altered; this means that, once purely in the Intellectual, no one of us can have any memory of our experience here. Further; if all intellection is timeless- as appears from the fact that the Intellectual beings are of eternity not of time- there can be no memory in the intellectual world, not merely none of earthly things but none whatever: all is presence There; for nothing passes away, there is no change from old to new. #### This, however, does not alter the fact that distinction exists in that realm- downwards from the Supreme to the Ideas, upward from the Ideas to the Universal and to the Supreme. Admitting that the Highest, as a self-contained unity, has no outgoing effect, that does not prevent the soul which has attained to the Supreme from exerting its own characteristic Act: it certainly may have the intuition, not by stages and parts, of that Being which is without stage and part. #### But that would be in the nature of grasping a pure unity? No: in the nature of grasping all the intellectual facts of a many that constitutes a unity. For since the object of vision has variety [distinction within its essential oneness] the intuition must be multiple and the intuitions various, just as in a face we see at the one glance eyes and nose and all the rest. #### But is not this impossible when the object to be thus divided and treated as a thing of grades, is a pure unity? #### No: there has already been discrimination within the Intellectual-Principle; the Act of the soul is little more than a reading of this. #### First and last is in the Ideas not a matter of time, and so does not bring time into the soul's intuition of earlier and later among them. There is a grading by order as well: the ordered disposition of some growing thing begins with root and reaches to topmost point, but, to one seeing the plant as a whole, there is no other first and last than simply that of the order. #### Still, the soul [in this intuition within the divine] looks to what is a unity; next it entertains multiplicity, all that is: how explain this grasping first of the unity and later of the rest? #### The explanation is that the unity of this power [the Supreme] is such as to allow of its being multiple to another principle [the soul], to which it is all things and therefore does not present itself as one indivisible object of intuition: its activities do not [like its essence] fall under the rule of unity; they are for ever multiple in virtue of that abiding power, and in their outgoing they actually become all things. #### For with the Intellectual or Supreme- considered as distinct from the One- there is already the power of harbouring that Principle of Multiplicity, the source of things not previously existent in its superior. ####  |